April 2012

March 2012

Post

Per Xbit labs and discussion on Reddit's /r/buildapc, reductions in DRAM supply are causing an increase in DDR3 RAM module prices. The change has been significant, and the results are not pretty...

The gray banding represents the min/max price. Blue highlighting represents the intensity plot of prices. As you can see, over the last week or two the minimum price has increased sharply, and overall prices are trending upward at a fast rate.

It's unclear at this point how much higher the cost of RAM will go. If you're looking to buy in the next few months, this is definitely something you'll want to keep in mind.

This blows. I saved and as part of my new system bought 2x4GB 1600MHz in Dec for $28. Great! Until I discovered one of the sticks wouldn't work. Did all the usual tests and it seemed to be a cold solder joint. Looked at RMAing, but it would cost ME $18 to ship it back!

Exhausting all avenues, I decided that it would be better to reflow the stick and if that didn't work just buy a new set. I carefully peel off the heatsink and found one of the memory chips sticking to the double sided tape. Looking closer, I was right... cold solder joints on that chip which caused the traces to rip as well. Stick is toast.

Went to go and buy a new set and I have been waiting since early Jan for prices to be reasonable. But nothing yet!!

This is sad......I have been checking the ram prices over the years, 2012 pretty much had the cheapest prices (Hell I could have gotten 16gb of 2133mhz for $84!!!) but since I had no time to buy the parts, I am stuck with 2013 where the prices have gone up :(

Maybe a silly question, but I am new to this as my son(12) wants to build his own PC and he told me to come to this site to check on prices of his list and I was met by the RAM INCREASE PRICE CHART. MY question, WHY is a product that is not seeing any additional R&D or getting any 'better' would be increasing in price??? Was there a loss of production at a main provider??? There can't be a big enough increase in demand to justify the increase in price.
Obviously, I am just guessing, based on my own logic.
Is there a REAL reason for this trend?

what is going up is DDR3 memory. i personally believe that the increase in price is intentional because they want the market to adopt DDR4 faster than when we got DDR3. basically, RAM manufacturing companies have slowed down or stopped making DDR3 and now they're making DDR4 to stock it up. they'll slowly squeeze all the profits they can out of DDR3, and when the price gets high enough and they get close to running out, they'll launch DDR4 and make massive profits. not only that, current motherboards only accept DDR3, so people will be replacing entire rigs.

they're hoping to force one last profit cycle out of the desktop market before everything goes to tablets and smartphones and cloud storage.

Apparently back in September of 2013 the South Korean based Hynix plant in Wuxi suffered a major fire... The price of the benchmark DDR3 2-gigabit dynamic random-access memory chip reached $2.27 yesterday, compared with $1.60 on Sept. 4 2013, the fire forced the closing of SK Hynix’s factory in Wuxi, according to DRAMeXchange, Asia’s largest market for the components. Icheon, South Korea-based SK Hynix expects to resume production on the fire-hit line next month. But basically like the price of gas, we won't see a reduction in price for sometime as SK Hynix catches up with demand.

Note; I just noticed that this forum is dated March of 2013, and the price of RAM was already on the rise, thus if the fire happened back in September 2013... That doesn't look bode to well for the price of RAM to calm back down to sensible levels on the market anytime soon. :-P